Notice how Noah didn’t add 100 other things to his plan. He focused on his one clear goal (100,000 downloads) and the three ways he’d reach it.

That doesn’t mean he didn’t send out a single Tweet or Facebook post about his podcast launch. He did. But he didn’t make it a part of his strategy, instead he just shared it across his profiles as he does with other content every day.

STEP 3: GET YOUR FIRST REVIEWS

When most people think about how to start a podcast, they think about audio equipment, editing software and coming up with a jazzy name—all of which are important. But one area often overlooked is reviews.

Think of it this way…

If you were to arrive at a party and see that you were one of only a few people there, would you stay? Probably not. There’s no social proof at the party to convince you it’s worthwhile. This is what potential podcast subscribers experience when they show up at a podcast that has no reviews.

Your first reviews will help create social proof and show people your podcast is worth subscribing to.

The more reviews you have, the more reviews you’ll get. Here’s how to get that momentum going initially, so the rest of your launch is more effective.

Pro Tip: When Noah first launched his podcast he had 5 episodes ready to publish in the first week so people had more content to listen to and base their reviews on.

1. GET SUPPORT FROM PEOPLE YOU KNOW

You already have an audience.

Friends, family members, coworkers, employees, and your professional network are all untapped assets you can use to your advantage. And you need to ask them to support your podcast launch.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to lack the confidence to use your network. Your network wants to support you.

So get that boost of initial reviews by engaging your existing audience.

Noah reached out to his network to ask them to support his launch in specific ways.

Instead of just emailing Billy and asking him to share the podcast, Noah was specific and supplied a swipe file containing copy Billy could use to share on his social media pages.

So Billy posted it on his Facebook page:

Get your network involved and get that initial boost of subscribers and reviews.

If you have any influential friends or family members in your podcast’s target industry, ask them to share your podcast with their audience.

2. MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR EMAIL LIST

Getting a dozen or so reviews when you launch your podcast shouldn’t be impossible if you use the audience you already have.

Yup, Noah has a big email list. So you could write this off as something you could never do, skip away from this article, and give up on your podcast altogether.

STEP 4: RUN A HIGHLY TARGETED GIVEAWAY

Well-executed giveaways are highly valuable for any launch strategy. Hence why Noah included a giveaway as part of his podcast launch strategy. With his giveaway, Noah landed 500+ reviews from 600 giveaway entries.

In case you weren’t aware, 500 reviews is mind-blowingly good. Most shows run for years without ever reaching 100 reviews.

But because he was asking for reviews rather than a simple social share or email, he had to do things a bit differently.

Here are five steps to running a highly successful giveaway:

1. GET PARTICIPANTS TO LEAVE A REVIEW

Without reviews, a podcast is like an empty restaurant.

In iTunes, reviews help establish trust and if a podcast has plenty of good, 5-star reviews it must be good, right?

That’s why you should require entrants to leave a podcast review to receive a chance to win.

And it’s worth noting that Noah wasn’t asking for positive reviews. He was asking for honest reviews.

It’s easy to press one button and enter a giveaway by sending a tweet. It’s not as easy to visit iTunes from your phone, search a podcast, subscribe to it and type out a thoughtful review. That’s why you need to make your giveaway worthwhile.

Pro Tip: To make it easier for people to find his podcast page, Noah created a simple redirect from http://okdork.com/podcast that opened up the iTunes Store to his podcast.

2. GIVE AWAY A HIGH-VALUE SUITE OF PRODUCTS

If you want your audience to go above and beyond to enter your giveaway (like leaving a podcast review on iTunes), you’ll have to give away something that is:

Highly related to your podcast topic. No iPads or Amazon gift cards. This will just leave you with tons of low-value reviewers who don’t care about what you do, and won’t add to social proof for your podcast.

Valuable. Your audience needs to feel the prize is worth their effort. Noah’s podcast is about growing successful businesses. What’s more targeted than a group of SaaS products to help an entrepreneur do this?

3. EXTEND YOUR REACH BY GETTING GIVEAWAY PARTNERS TO PROMOTE

You could Tweet your giveaway or post it to your Facebook page, but if you don’t have a large following, it’s probably not going to do much.

And if you’re only sharing with your own audience, you’re missing out on opportunities to reach new people.

If your partners promote the giveaway (and therefore your podcast), you’re able to reach audiences much larger than yours...

...expanding your reach and increasing social proof:

More exposure for them through the giveaway + them promoting your podcast to their audience = a win/win.

The influence of partners you’re able to cross-promote with might depend on your own reach and email list size, but even if you only have a few hundred people in your audience, you’ll still be able to find a partner.

Think about:

Products you use and love. As a customer, you might be able to score some discounts to share with your audience.

Contacts you’re close to. Maybe you know someone who runs marketing at a neat SaaS product and could help you out.

Your second and third-degree Linkedin contacts. Could you get a warm into to someone at a company you’re keen to cross-promote with.

Pro Tip: To use scarcity to its full potential, use your email subject line to communicate how long they have left to enter. Don’t rely on them opening the email to discover the urgency. They won’t.

STEP 5: MAKE YOUR PODCAST LAUNCH BUZZWORTHY

Ever wonder why people love early releases and VIP events so much? It’s because it makes them feel special. Like they have something others don’t. It triggers the feeling of exclusivity, which is powerful in marketing psychology, and makes the product “buzzworthy”. This is why influencers often have launch teams to assist with their launches.

You want your podcast launch to be buzzworthy, too. So trigger some exclusivity to get your audience primed for your launch.

Here’s how you can do just that:

COMPILE A VIP LIST

One way Noah triggered exclusivity was by finding VIPs for the launch. Being a VIP makes people feel more involved. When people feel involved, it gives them ownership.[*]

People who feel a sense of ownership act.

VIPs are far more likely to:

Share your podcast

Subscribe to your podcast

Review your podcast

And do everything in their power to make your launch a success.

Noah compiled a list of VIPs by surveying his audience across social media and his email list. The survey served a couple of main purposes:

To learn what people wanted out of Noah’s podcast

To build a list of raving fans (that’s the VIP list)

One of the questions on Noah’s survey was whether they were interested in being a VIP for the show and mentioned they’d receive some special perks for taking part.

About 2,300 people filled out the survey, and a portion of them became VIPs.

You don’t need a huge list of VIPs to make your podcast buzzworthy. Even a few strong advocates and launch partners to help you get the word out can be powerful.

GIVE YOUR VIPS SNEAK PEEKS

VIPs for your launch can be a powerful tool to make it buzzworthy.

But it only works if you treat them like VIPs.

Once you’ve compiled a list of special people to help you launch your show, you need to make them feel more involved.

That means giving them behind the scenes sneak peeks (like this email Noah sent, that you can use as a template for your own VIPs):

Or early access to episodes and more information than you’d give the general public:

The more information they have about your launch, the more helpful they can be to help make your launch a success.

Plus, your content is good (right?) which means that your VIPs will be eager to share your episodes once you launch.

But you still have to make it worthwhile…

PROMOTE YOUR VIPS

Some people will want to be VIPs just to be involved.

But most people will only want to be VIPs if there’s something in it for them.

And that’s fair enough. VIPhood at concerts or in stores usually means early access, discounts, or something compelling.

So Noah gave his VIPs a compelling reason to participate by offering to mention them in one of his podcast episodes:

That’s a pretty sweet deal on top of the early access to information and behind-the-scenes sneak peaks.

Pro Tip: Tell your VIPs how they can help with the podcast launch. Noah was specific: he wanted them to subscribe and share with two friends. Specificity gets results.

STEP 6: GET MASSIVE RESULTS WITH INFLUENCER MARKETING

It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out or you’re a well-connected veteran like Noah:

Influencer marketing is a game-changer.

And Noah used this tactic extensively with the launch of his podcast and you can too.

Doesn’t matter if you’re not in the marketing niche. Your topic or industry does have influencers. Find them. Interview them. Get in front of their audiences.

Pro Tip: Find influential guests besides the people who constantly show up on podcasts. Don’t just target the people to be a guest on your show who you’ve seen on every single podcast in your topic. A couple of reasons:

They do so many interviews that they’re less likely to have something new to say to your audience

They’re bombarded with requests and are less likely to share your interview in a meaningful way.

Noah did have some popular guests on his show. But he didn’t just bring on the Tim Ferriss's and Brian Deans of the world.

He also looked at his connections who had audiences but weren’t as public as others. For example, Noah reached out to some NPR producers:

Do a quick audit of the website and offer some (free) advice on how it could be improved

Write a blog post/create a video explaining one thing you’ve learned from that influencer

GET IN FRONT OF THE INFLUENCER’S EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS

Once you’ve built a solid connection with influencers, you can ask them to help you promote your podcast. But be specific with your ask. Instead of just asking for their help promoting, ask them to email out.

Emails = the real MVP aka Most Valuable Player.

I can send a tweet to my 5,000 followers and only 20 people will engage, but when I send an email to my subscribers, I’ll see 50x that.

But, one huge mistake most people make when they’re asking an influencer for a favor is that they make the influencer work for it.

Or rather, they try to make the influencer work for it. But they won’t. They’re busy.

You have to do the work to get the share.

Make it super simple to get that share by sending the influencer a swipe file with a pre-written email ready to be loaded into their email service provider and sent to their audiences.

Making it simple and specific resulted in influencers emailing their lists:

But emailing is a big ask, and most influencers won’t promote that way (though you can still ask if you’re feeling lucky…). Getting shares on social media is still valuable.

And Noah also made it a no-brainer to share the podcast on social media. Recognizing that images do best on social, he made his podcast cover accessible as well with a DropBox link:

Giving the influencer options while also being specific led to more shares, more subscribers, and more listeners for the podcast.

But remember: the fortune is in the follow up. Noah didn’t just send them one email at the beginning of his promotion strategy to ask them to promote, and then expect them to schedule it in their calendars.

These people are busy, remember? Instead, he reminded them to promote the podcast through an email, and made it even more of a no-brainer with a calendar invite to remind them:

All this work paid off, resulting in influencers sharing with their audiences:

For massive likes, traffic, fame, and glory.

You can (and should) engage in influencer marketing, too.

STEP 7: GIVE YOURSELF A LEG UP WITH FACEBOOK ADS

Most of the strategies in this case study are free.

But we all know that money makes most everything more effective. And if you have some money to invest in your launch, Facebook ads are an excellent way to go.

Unlike a lot of other paid promotion strategies, Facebook ads win because they’re cheap. You don’t need a huge amount of money to make these ads effective.

Noah used Facebook ads to give his podcast an initial boost that paid off by helping him hit the #40 spot in the iTunes chart. He did so with two methods:

Promoting his individual podcast episodes

Promoting his giveaway.

PROMOTE YOUR INDIVIDUAL EPISODES

Remember how I said you should interview influential guests to get more downloads for your podcast?

Not only are those influential guests likely to share with their audience, but this strategy also builds social proof. And here’s where you gotta use that social proof.

Boost Facebook posts to the guests’ audience by targeting those who “Like” the guests’ Facebook page:

This ad was Noah’s highest performing promotion on Facebook, and you can see why.

Use an easily recognizable image of the guest in the ad, ideally with a picture of you next to it to boost your own profile.

Obviously, you can't do this with Tim Ferriss unless he's a guest on your podcast, but you can do this with your guests by boosting a Facebook post to their audience.

PROMOTING YOUR GIVEAWAY

You can also take a page out of Noah’s book to run ads to promote your giveaway:

Pro Tip: Steer clear of using "share on your Timeline to enter", "share on your friend's Timeline to get additional entries" and "tag your friends in this post to enter" as these types of promotions are not allowed by Facebook.[*]

Also worth checking any giveaway restrictions in your country or state.

This will help expose your giveaway to audiences who may never would have otherwise heard about your podcast.

Use the logos of the company you worked with as social proof and display them next to your podcast cover.